Merezhkovski is talking of the heroes of Dostoevski; but his remark is applicable to the work of nearly all Russian novelists, and especially to Chekhov and Andreev. It is a profound criticism that, if once grasped by the foreign reader, will enable him to understand much in Russian fiction that otherwise would be a sealed book. Every one must have noticed how Russians are hag-ridden by an idea; but no one except Merezhkovski has observed the PASSION of abstract thought. In some characters, such as those Dostoevski has given us, it leads to deeds of wild absurdity; in Andreev, it usually leads to madness. One of Andreev's books is indeed a whole commentary on the remark of Merezhkovski quoted above. The English title of the translation is "A Dilemma," but as the translator has explained, the name of the story in the original is "Thought (Mysl)." The chief character is a physician, Kerzhentsev, who reminds one constantly of Dostoevski's Raskolnikov, but whose states of mind are even more subtly analysed. No one should read this story unless his nerves are firm, for the outcome of the tale is such as to make almost any reader for a time doubt his own sanity. It is a curious study of the border-line between reason and madness. The physician, who rejoices in his splendid health, bodily vigour, and absolute equilibrium of mind, quietly determines to murder his best friend--to murder him openly and violently, and to go about it in such a way that he himself will escape punishment. He means to commit the murder to punish the man's wife because she had rejected him and married his friend, whom she loves with all the strength of her powerful nature. His problem, therefore, is threefold: he must murder the man, the man's wife must know that he is the murderer, and he must escape punishment. He therefore begins by feigning madness, and acting so well that his madness comes upon him only at long intervals; at a dinner-party he has a violent fit; but he waits a whole month before having another attack. Everything is beautifully planned; he smashes a plate with his fist, but no one observes that he has taken care previously to cover the plate with his napkin, so that his hand will not be cut. His friends are all too sorry for him to have any suspicion of a sinister intention; and his friend Alexis is fatuously secure. Not so the wife; she has an instinctive fear of the coming murder. One evening, when all three are together, the doctor picks up a heavy iron paper-weight, and Alexis says that with such an instrument a murderer might break a man's head. This is interesting. "It was precisely the head, and precisely with that thing that I had planned to crush it, and now that same head was telling how it would all end." Therefore he leads Alexis into a dispute by insisting that the paper-weight is too light. Alexis becomes angry, and actually makes the doctor take the object in his hand, and they rehearse his own murder. They are stopped by the wife,